I would ask if you think uploading videos to youtube that you feel obliged to produce for the sake of being 'productive', is really contributing to society.
We have a glut of online content. For every tweet that illuminates, there are 9 that constitute meaningless chatter, background noise that serves only to obfuscate the good stuff.
The freedom that the internet has given people to communicate is a wonderful and empowering thing, but the idea that we must 'produce' something to be contributing to our world is just wrong, in my opinion.
If you have free time, why not do some volunteer work in your community? Most countries have, for example, charities that help connect lonely elderly people with others to meet, say, for coffee once a week. I would say that represents a contribution of significant value.
This. Can you learn something so intensely that there's a purpose for you to produce, other than 'I don't feel like just enjoying and celebrating the creative works of others'?
Anyone who's really locked into the nasty treadmill of staying creatively relevant, truly loves a good fan or good consumer. Somebody's gotta do the experiencing, sift through the chaff, find the gold. If you're working in the creative sphere, odds are you can't even do that because keeping up a genuine creative output is too heavy of a commitment.
I think this is the future knocking at our doors. One day energy and goods will be all produced by robots and machines, and we will all be consumers by vocation, whose job it is to sift through the noise and find the signal. As we can see in this post, as soon as we're comfortable with that we're already unsatisfied, and want the celebrity of being informationally significant.
And that becomes the equivalent of a struggle for survival. Once survival is taken care of, it's beneath notice, and importance becomes everything. (or if you like, expressing informational generosity)
The freedom that the internet has given people to communicate is a wonderful and empowering thing, but the idea that we must 'produce' something to be contributing to our world is just wrong, in my opinion.
I disagree on the basis that you (currently) can't live life without also having a job or being rich. Just because you give your time to your job doesn't mean you're contributing, and having a job doesn't inherently make someone a contributor.
It's only true in the very narrow sense -- you're contributing to the economy by producing taxes and buying things. But the entire point of the question was that they wanted to avoid being just that.
I get that it probably makes people uncomfortable to be classified this way, but it's better to just embrace it. I haven't produced or contributed much myself. I'd like to, but I haven't, and I'm fine with that. But it'd be mistaken to pretend I have.
While I agree that most info out there is spam, I disagree with the conclusion that we should minimize the output.
Reason being that I think we are already far far beyond a point where decreasing output would do any meaningful impact. Therefore I think we need more, better filtering, to get rid of all the spam. The same way as with email.
And even if he wants to contribute in a field he's good at, like programming - creating your own project is often just an exercise in vanity, when you could do a lot more good, behind the scenes, as part of a larger group working on something more of value.
We have a glut of online content. For every tweet that illuminates, there are 9 that constitute meaningless chatter, background noise that serves only to obfuscate the good stuff.
The freedom that the internet has given people to communicate is a wonderful and empowering thing, but the idea that we must 'produce' something to be contributing to our world is just wrong, in my opinion.
If you have free time, why not do some volunteer work in your community? Most countries have, for example, charities that help connect lonely elderly people with others to meet, say, for coffee once a week. I would say that represents a contribution of significant value.